Nieuwe Instituut – New Currents: Indian Ocean Futures (ongoing)

Research Nights: Modernisms along the Indian Ocean, 2023. Photo: Tomas Mutsaers

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New Currents is a research project that investigates the Indian Ocean’s/Afrasian Sea’s intricate historical relations, evolving national alliances, and transmigration of ideas as a method for speculating about emerging spatial political futures amidst geopolitical complexities. The project asks: What currents can be traced, cut through, followed or reversed; and what do these flows of spaces, goods, labour, and information teach us about the future for the region?

New Currents highlights the unspoken/unspeakable relations forming within and along the Indian Ocean,, unfolding the futures at stake for this region. Geographically, the Indian Ocean serves as a nexus connecting West Asia and Europe, East and South Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Australia, along the littoral, the interior, as well as the archipelagic and oceanic,. Although Western political powers and discursive communities still regularly overlook the region, or limit its spatial understanding to a place or route of transit, the Indian Ocean/Afrasian Sea is a crucial lynchpin in global relations – historically, politically, culturally, economically, ecologically and spatially – and continues to grow in influence through evolving national alliances impacting borders and livelihoods.

Read more at Nieuwe Instituut.